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Only yesterday, Gregor Samsa was a meek salesman, browbeaten by his
unappreciative employer and depended on fiercely by his ungrateful
family. This morning, Gregor awakens to discover that, overnight,
he has been transformed into a monstrous insect. As Gregor
frantically tries to conceal his predicament, neither his family
nor his unsympathetic employer accept that a terrible metamorphosis
has upended his existence. Is Gregor’s condition only temporary?
Will he eventually revert back to the person he was and resume his
normal life? Or might he have to accept that his transformation is
only an outward expression of how he—and those in his
life—actually see him? First published in 1915, Kafka’s
best-known tale has inspired numerous interpretations for more than
a century and helped to establish the term “Kafkaesque” as a
reference to a bizarre and nightmarish experience. This collection
of his short fiction, in a new translation, includes more than 30
of his short stories and sketches, including “In the Penal
Colony,” “The Stoker,” “The Judgment,” “A Country
Doctor,” “A Hunger Artist,” and more. Â
The story itself, Kafka's most famous, hardly needs describing -
a travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to find
he has been transformed into an enormous bug - but Faber Finds is
offering something rare, the very first English translation which
has been out of print for over sixty years.
This pioneering translation by A. L. Lloyd was first published
in 1937. A. L. Lloyd was multi-talented: ethnomusicologist,
journalist, radio and television broadcaster, and translator. In
this his centenary year (2008) Faber Finds is celebrating him in
his first and last roles. His major work, Folk Song in England, is
being reissued as are his Lorca and Kafka translations. As well as
both being published in 1937 both were firsts; has anyone else had
Spanish and German translations published in the same year?
It should also be mentioned that A. L. Lloyd was a lifelong
communist. It is a delicious irony therefore that one of the first
reviews of the Kafka was by Evelyn Waugh in the short-lived "Night"
"and Day"; it was a good one too.
Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of
nightmare, but in Kafka's world, it is never completely clear just
what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from
even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it
will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing
tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of
disorientation. Superficially about bureaucracy, it is in the last
resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature.
Still more enigmatic is The Castle. Is it an allegory of a
quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject?
The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant
culture? A spiritual quest for grace or salvation? An individual's
struggle between his sense of independence and his need for
approval? Is it all of these things? And K? Is he opportunist,
victim, or an outsider battling against elusive authority? Finally,
in his fables, Kafka deals in dark and quirkily humorous terms with
the insoluble dilemmas of a world which offers no reassurance, and
no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional
uncertainties and anxieties.
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Metamorphosis (Hardcover)
Franz Kafka, Michael Hoffman
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R270
R211
Discovery Miles 2 110
Save R59 (22%)
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Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions
of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest
writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take
us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England
to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on
the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and
printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile
cloth and stamped with foil. One morning, ordinary salesman Gregor
Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach.
Metamorphosis, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, is
one of the twentieth century's most influential works of fiction,
and is accompanied here by two more classic stories. 'He is the
greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such
novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison
to him' - Vladimir Nabokov
Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an
intimate window into the desires and hopes of the
twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writer Kafka first
made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was
translating his early short prose into Czech, and their
relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his
feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so,
laid bare his heart and his conscience. While at times Milena's
'genius for living' gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted
him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In
1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in
1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving
record of their relationship.
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